Watching this film makes me want to delve back into Blender and look at 3D animation more seriously. I’ve always wanted to be good at this kind of stuff. A few years ago, I spent a few months learning how to use Blender and how 3D modeling worked, and I ended up creating some pretty satisfying results. I’ve forgotten all that information now; maybe I’ll start messing around with it again in my spare time.

Anyway, you can download the movie for free from their website, or you can watch it online here.

Changes include the replacement of brown tints on menu selections with orange, a tab-like button for drop-down menus, improved checkboxes, radio buttons, and progress bars, and glows on selected buttons. It’s a bit difficult to try to describe all of the improvements in this new version of the theme, so if the screenshot above doesn’t satisfy you, I encourage you to try it out for yourself!

You can find the beta version of the theme at http://people.ubuntu.com/~stefanor/light-themes. Note that only the Ambience theme is available at the moment, but the Radiance (which, in my opinion, definitely needs improvement) is also being worked on.

(via Canonical Design)

I was one of those guys that got really excited about Wave. I watched the entire 80-minute keynote twice, and skipped through it many more times after that. As my roommates and I huddled around my laptop and watched Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon plan out their shopping trip in Wave, we excitedly talked about our hopes that Wave would significantly change the way we communicated online forever. “Email will never be the same!” we cried. “Finally, instant messaging works like an actual conversation!” And best of all, it was open source! To us, Google Wave was an internet communication Messiah that we didn’t know we needed until we saw it.

I signed up for the beta the second I knew that they were offering sign-ups. I remember when people first started getting access to the site, and everyone (including me) would scour forums and blogs for people passing out invites. ”Invitations will not be sent immediately,” Google said. “We have a lot of stamps to lick.” Oh, how I wished they would like faster! I hated that feeling of missing out on all of the fun!

But when my invitation finally did arrive, and I loaded the Wave dashboard for the first time, I didn’t have a clue what to do with it. Since I was the first out of my friends to have access to the beta, my first task was inviting my friends, but even when I had people to communicate and collaborate with, we still really didn’t know what to do. We came up with a few use-cases, like creating a list of movies we wanted to watch on movie night and editing class notes, but nothing more creative than that. And, because the site was horribly slow and buggy at this time, collaborating on our movies and notes was more of a chore than anything else.

Still I had high hopes for Wave. Google helped us out by showing us ways in which Wave could be used, and I was able to convince those in two of my group projects to use it for our project. But as time passed, I slowly started to dread logging into buggy Wave in order to edit a document, and started moving back to my old ways of doing things. Pretty soon Wave became little more than an occasional thought. And not just in my mind; many others stopped using the service because they too couldn’t figure out what it was all about. So Wave began to slowly die.

And it’s sad; I really wanted it to catch on. It had so much potential–real-time instant messaging, automatic spelling correction (at least according to the demo…I never had the opportunity to see it in action), superb collaborative tools, even on-the-fly language translation. But it was too confusing, too slow, and too buggy to be of any real use. The fact that it was invite-only for the longest time didn’t help things much, either.

I feel sorry for Lars and Stephanie. This was their baby, their masterpiece. A year ago people were applauding them for revitalizing the world of internet communication. And now their brainchild is being scrapped. I wonder what it must feel like, to have worked passionately for years on a project you thought would change the world, and then see that project die? It must feel absolutely horrible.

I also feel sorry for those who put a great deal of faith in Wave. Those who actually understood its usefulness and used it correctly. Those people like Gina Trapani, who wrote an entire book on Google Wave, using Wave itself to help her write the book. In a recent interview, Gina says that she uses Wave on a daily basis, and that Google’s decision has made her guide into a history book. She invested a lot into this, and now it’s all for nothing.

And I feel sorry for me. Because even though I stopped using the service, I still had hoped that one day I would understand how to use it the right way, and that it might become an invaluable tool to me. Now that day will never come.

So long, Wave. You will be missed.

I updated Dothan Community Church’s website for their anniversary on July 25, 2010. Now I have a peace about displaying the site on my portfolio.

I had the opportunity to play around with an alpha version of App Inventor last year for one of my programming courses. This was before I knew how to program in Java or use the Android SDK. Using App Inventor, I was able to create a simple app that made decisions for the user. I also tried developing a Tumblr app, but at that time App Inventor wasn’t so flexible or feature-rich. We’ll have to see if the public beta is more powerful, or if such an application is outside of App Inventor’s target audience.

Request access to App Inventor here.

If this catches on, maybe people will visit Starbucks to actually buy coffee.

I’m also going to take another stab at keeping this site current. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m horrible at keeping this site fresh with new material. In order to combat this site stagnation, I’ve incorporated feeds from other places I frequent (my Flickr stream, Delicious links, and Twitter feed, for now) into the site. Now, even if I’m not blogging, you’ll be able to see what I have been doing elsewhere online. (This isn’t a cop-out: I’m still going to work on my blogging skills.)

Hope you enjoy the new site. If you experience any problems with it, feel free to contact me.

Since I had yet to figure out how to use Android’s text-to-speech engine and accelerometer, I figured it was a good time to fool around and learn how they worked.

I spent last night reading countless accelerometer tutorials and trying to remember simple physics, and finally came out with a working app. (Since only uses rudimentary physics calculations, so it’s not the most accurate thing in the world, but hey–this is more for fun than it is for practical use.)

Here’s Julian Smith’s sketch if you haven’t seen it yet:

I developed my first Android application this week, Gordian. Gordian is an app that lets you create your own custom secret codes based on simple base codes (such as a Caesar shift or reverse code).

It’s lacking in the feature department for now, but I’ve got a lot in store (import/export, more base codes, file encoding/decoding), but for now I’m pretty satisfied with it. I developed this from start to finish this week, knowing very little about the Android development process on Monday, and learning a ton of new things each day. And, unlike so many other areas of my life (ahem), I didn’t give up half-way through; I finished it!